Monday, January 05, 2015

The loneliest moment in someone's
life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all
they can do is stare blankly.

(The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott
Fitzgerald)

Accepting

It's the unsettling truth that may be
the hardest part right now for a large portion of white America;
after all, the U.S. has the oldest functioning Constitution in the
world, and that might be the problem on any number of levels.

It was the brilliant James Madison,
author of the United States Bill of Rights and one of the authors of
The Federalist Papers who, in 1787, said, “They ought to be
constituted [the nation] as to protect the minority of the opulent
against the majority.” Ah, always the dangerous mob, the rabble, a
consistent yet unspoken “through-line” of the United States.

Is an 18th century
document going to serve our needs in the 21st century?
Most likely not. Our social and political myths—created most
certainly by white America and in particular the “minority of the
opulent”--have largely remained intact for more than 200 years. The
last occupying foreign army in the United States was the British
during the war of 1812.

The many reasons given for not voting
in the recent mid-term election represent at the very least
intellectual laziness, be they offered by the “millennials,”
those that just find the Republican party repugnant and of course the
“disenchanted” liberals. But we've reached the point where we can
probably say “so what” with some qualifications. The rot has
advanced too far.

The Democratic party is a feckless
relic, a hollow shell; yet, it possibly could morph into some sort of
sane conservative movement, at some point in the future. The handful
of genuine Democratic political progressives in the party, and they
are only a handful, ought to be spending their time building a new
progressive movement elsewhere.

The Republican party, the party of
Lincoln, at least outside the benighted Confederacy, is really about
the intentional development of an authentic, nativist, totalitarian
movement, what the Europeans were familiar with in the 20th
century and that may be once again rearing its head in Europe in the
21st century.

Black America, more than anyone else,
clearly has a compelling reason to develop an organized and
disciplined movement, one capable of acquiring greater political
power at the national and most definitely at the local level.

The Occupy movement demonstrated that
people could come together for political change with a serious moral
purpose, but Occupy ultimately floundered and became a minor irritant
to the kleptocracy and the political hacks that do its bidding.

We seem to have difficulty accepting
the fact at the present time, but radical change is never a brief
“get together” without any clear, definable objectives. To
succeed, a movement has to ultimately bring in large, diverse groups
of people of all ages, who aren't going away under any circumstances.

Of course it's about power, gathering
it in and confronting those who refuse to give it up. Above all, it
has to be unremitting and offer an understandable alternative to the
status quo. This is not something done overnight nor is it a fervent
wish for some messianic vision to make it happen.

An excellent time to begin is in
January 2015. There will be more than enough motivation to go around.
Once again from The Great Gatsby, a novel about illusion: “Americans
while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate
about being peasantry.” Well, we'll find out.

For an interesting documentary on the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the use of police repression
and the connections between what happened more than a 100 years ago
and today, watch the video below.

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About Me

"We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes--something known only to her and to the mountains." (Aldo Leopold, "Thinking Like a Mountain")
"We are the rich. We own America. We got it, God knows how, but we intend to keep it." (Frederick Townsend Martin, 19th century plutocrat)